As is known by one skilled in the art, in order to combat multipath fading and interference in mobile networks, such as UMTS ones, it has been proposed to introduce receive diversity into (inner) communication receivers. A receive diversity inner receiver comprises two antenna elements respectively arranged to receive the same signals representative of information symbols through channels with similar characteristics, and a rake comprising a master rake module, a slave rake module and a derotator arranged to process the received signals, so that they do not cancel each other and allows their information symbols to be retrieved.
Thanks to this receive diversity the receiver receives a signal with twice the strength, i.e. with a gain of 3 dB in SNR (“Signal-to-Noise Ratio”), which leads to a still greater gain in terms of BER (“Bit Error Rate”) and BLER (“Block Error Rate”) due to the non-linear behaviour of the channel coding gain. Unfortunately receive diversity requires to double the receiver complexity, size and power consumption, so that introducing receive diversity is almost equivalent to using two classical receivers in the same handset (or mobile communication equipment).